Technical Field
The present description relates to processing digital images.
One or more embodiments may be used for creating clusters of images, e.g., in managing photo collections/mobile photo collections.
Description of the Related Art
Humans are better are certain tasks than machines. For example, humans can simply look at a set of images and easily and directly sort the images, for example, into images of particular categories (e.g., images of people, of cats, of dogs, of mountains, etc.), images of a same scene, etc. Machines, however cannot so easily sort a set of images. The ability of automatically creating clusters of a set of images may be a desirable option in various applications.
For instance, a user of a mobile phone may take photographs while on vacation and then wish to select the best shots after a travel, e.g., on a per-category basis. A clustering procedure may suggest groups of semantically-related photos and propose to the user to select those held to be the most representative of the set and/or those with the highest quality.
As a further example, in an Internet-based service, the ability of re-organizing large photo datasets uploaded by users in a random manner via remote servers may be a useful option in order to facilitate dataset browsing and search.
A clustering procedure may be useful, e.g., in finding near duplicates photos in a set, helping the user to organize a personal photo collection and/or deleting duplicates.
In a visual search environment, a clustering procedure may facilitate eliminating near-duplicate results so that the most relevant results may be presented to a user.
Fast search times may also represent a desirable feature, possibly with search performed incrementally as the photos are shot to improve system responsiveness.